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We are excited to announce that Greater Mercer TMA (GMTMA) is sponsoring the 2nd annual Safe Routes to School Bookmark Design Contest for students in grades 3-5. This year’s contest theme: “My favorite place to walk/ bike is…”

Whether it is walking to school, to a friend’s house, along the boardwalk or the beach, every student will have a favorite place to walk or bike!

This contest coincides with the Walk and Bike to School Month and we hope to get students thinking about walking and biking to school. This is a fun and healthy choice for themselves and their community. The winner will receive a $50 gift card and a walking /biking safety kit. Winning bookmarks will be printed and distributed to participating school libraries and promoted through our website and other media outlets.

We received so many creative entries in 2014 and can’t wait to see the entries for 2015!

Greater Mercer TMA is always available for Safe Routes to School information, free educational programs, and safety discussions. Please visit our website www.gmtma.org for more information on how GMTMA can help your students become more active and live a healthy lifestyle safely.

Contest open to students in Mercer and Ocean County. Winners will be selected in both counties. To enter the contest, fill out this form.

Like the variation between the cost for a small sedan and a SUV, bike costs can vary a lot, too. Here’s hypothetical cases for a high quality and an economical setup, based on online prices from the same national outdoor recreation equipment company:

Typical bike maintenance is easy enough to learn that many people do it themselves – fixing a flat tire, lubing a chain, adjusting brakes – a web search shows numerous how-to videos that are very instructive. Blogger James Schwartz assumed $50 per year for maintaining a $1500 commuter bike.

Clearly, bike commuting saves a lot of money if you can actually reduce the number of cars you own, since you can buy multiple high quality new bikes and gear every year for much less than the operating costs of even a small sedan. But it is very difficult in the suburbs to go car free, so what if you only have one car? Then the savings will only be based on reduced miles driven, which saves on gas, maintenance, tires and depreciation.

According to the AAA report, the operating costs (gas, maintenance, tires) for a small sedan is 16.3 cents/mile, and 23.8 cents/mile for a SUV. If your commute is 2 miles each way, like mine, then 4 miles roundtrip x 240 working days/year equals 960 miles biked each year.

The 960 mile reduction in driving would save $156.48 (operating costs) plus $33.60 (reduced depreciation), totaling $190.08 for a small sedan, and $228.48 (operating costs) plus $48.96 for (reduced depreciation), totaling $277.44 for an SUV. This is in the range for paying for the annual bike costs, but hardly a killer incentive by itself. It will help if your employer offers you the IRS Bicycle Commuter Tax Benefit – you can be reimbursed up to $240 each year for bike commuting expenses.

Of course you might choose to use the commuter bike for other errands, such as small grocery runs, to the bank, post office, etc. Since only 15% of our trips are for commuting, that leaves a lot of other trips that could be done by bike – e.g. 40% of all trips are 2 miles or less, and if you take the bike/walk trips out of the denominator, 69% of car trips are 2 miles or less.

Of course, you’ll save more in indirect costs, for example if you substitute biking for a gym membership, that could save about $1000/year. And the potential for saving money on health care is huge, since you may be much healthier with regular activity.

So, you want an affordable, good-sized house. To get it, you have to move far away from the city. This was the prevailing direction of housing migration in our country for many years, and it is the birth of what is now called the “suburban sprawl”. But along with the sprawl in the suburbs came the need and the dependence to our cars, and this, according to Jeff Speck, was the beginning of a decline in our health, an economic instability, and significant environmental consequences.

In this TED talk, Jeff Speck is talking about how rethinking the design of our cities (and suburbs) is going to make a difference in the way we live, how the disappearance of the “useful walk” is linked to obesity rate among adults and at an alarming rate among children.

Besides the diabetes, asthma, and heart disease linked to a car-centric lifestyle, he also mentions the fact that many people die in car crashes. He says that a city designed around cars is “good at smashing them into each other.”

He also talks about one city in America (can you guess which one?) that moved away from that model and how that changed the quality of life of the people living in that city and the advantages of moving away from a car-centric way of life.

He makes a very persuasive argument and I really enjoyed watching this. I would like to see more people having access to walkable / bikeable places and more complete streets where everyone can share the road while feeling safe at the same time.

This is just a preview; there is a lot more learn in his talk. Hope you enjoy it too!

If you want to tell us what you think or have a commuting story you want to share, please contact us.

Made a few changes to the commuter bike in the year it’s been flogged every day 2 miles to the office and back – for reference, see last year’s post Accessorizing the Commuter Bike.

There were two main issues – pain in the shoulder, caused by the straight handlebar, and pain in the neck, caused by dealing with the hydraulic disc brakes (mental pain, not physical).

Swapping the straight handlebar for a mustache bar provided the hand position that prevented shoulder pain (yep, even on a ten minute ride). Tried new grips, which didn’t help, then swapped the grips from my mountain bike to this bike – when that didn’t help it had to be the bar, because those grips are very comfortable on the mountain bike’s straight handlebar.

The next, more obviously self-inflicted issue, was that some idiot overloaded the light duty rack on grocery runs. The rack uses the fender as support, and the rivet-nut holding it to the frame pulled out (not just once, either), so the guys at the shop drilled and through bolted it to the frame – problem solved. (Also, bought a cargo bike so don’t need to overload the commuter bike anymore – an expensive fix, you might say, and my spouse would certainly agree – more in another post.)

The less obviously self-inflicted issue was dealing with the hydraulic disc brakes. One time, some idiot took off the wheel to put on the winter tires and closed the brake lever. You probably know that if you don’t have something for the brake to grab (disc, credit card, cardboard, etc.) it will not open back up, and the wheel will not go back on. Anyway, back to the shop to have the brake lines bled, and not for the 1st time.

The first time back to the shop was after a few months of winter riding and the lever went all the way to the handle without stopping much. Another time was to get the brakes to stop screeching, and to put some silicone around the fender rivets so they stopped rattling. The last straw was when some road gook got into the front brake on a ride to Hopewell, and I fought and listened to the tick from the brake all the way back to West Windsor, because there’s no way to loosen the calipers on hydraulic brakes in the field. I’d had enough – they were simply not idiot-proof enough for this idiot. The new mechanical disc brakes not only have ways to loosen them, they have dials for making adjustments and a fancy way to automatically align the calipers. It sure sounds good.

On the sound advice from the good folks at the shop, let’s talk about bike maintenance and keeping your bike clean. If (like a certain someone) you just ride it and occasionally lube the chain (sometimes after wiping the main gook off), you will have a much harder time pedaling by the end of the year – maybe because the derailleur pulleys rust into place. Really, it’s a wonder I could pedal at all. You might think this would encourage better bike cleaning, but instead it has me thinking about belt drives – anyone have experience to share?